


Two Seeming Bodies

by platoapproved



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, It's mild but better to warn than not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:37:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platoapproved/pseuds/platoapproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thousand variations upon the theme of Abigail were friends with a thousand variations upon the theme of Marissa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Seeming Bodies

  
_ So we grow together,  _   
_ Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, _   
_ But yet an union in partition; _   
_ Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; _   
_ So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; _   
**_ -Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii.208-212 _ **   


\+ + +

They had known each other since they were four, in the way that only girls who live a quick barefoot summer sprint from one another can know each other. For years their lives were swings and climbed fences, birthday parties and badly painted toenails, carpooling to ballet class at six and to SAT prep at sixteen. Abigail did not have any siblings, but she knew what it is to grow alongside someone, to keep a catalogue in your head of all the different, contradictory, overlapping versions of them.

Neither of them believed they resembled one another, but they were often mistaken for sisters by strangers. They embraced this for a while because it felt right – to say that they were friends seemed insufficient.

To her it was nothing idyllic. Enough familiarity will drive even the gentlest person to some private contempts, and they were neither of them ever wholly gentle. They had their fights, petty jealousies, bursts of vicious competition, resentments. She tried to hide it, but Marissa would go through periods of boredom with Abigail, and Abigail always knew. In part because of this, Abigail never entirely trusted Marissa, and Marissa knew it, too.

But all of that was a part of their bond, and did not diminish it.

Together they tried on different identities, tested what was true and what was real. As children, they would invent and act out stories together with energy and pathos. They solemnly believed in magic together, sat on the floor of Marissa’s room at midnight with the window open and prayed to be spirited away to a world of their own, felt their small limbs heavy with power, enveloped by wonder. Years later they laughed and pretended it had felt like a game. They hypothesized careers to one another: for a while they were going to be musicians, for a while, diplomats. Plans were made and abandoned, opinions stated and later revised or denied outright. A thousand variations upon the theme of Abigail were friends with a thousand variations upon the theme of Marissa.

(In the weeks after her murder, Marissa’s absence and their whole intertwined history were layered over everything Abigail touched: combs, scarves, zebra pens, necatrines, foods she’d liked, songs she’d liked, colors she’d liked, phrases she’d used so often Abigail still heard them in her voice. Dr. Bloom said that was ordinary. It didn’t comfort her.)

\+ + +

Abigail remembered a softer Marissa, knew that if Marissa were still alive, she could remember a more gullible Abigail. 

Marissa had had to build her armor much earlier than Abigail. Puberty, with its uneven rates of development and its cruel vicissitudes, had stranded her for seven months, at twelve years old, as the only girl in their year at school with discernible breasts. At first Abigail had felt envious, until she saw that Marissa now got the lion’s share of stares and comments and unwanted hands, saw her subject to all that species of disgusting bullying that the teachers told Marissa she should be grateful for.

Abigail thought it wouldn’t have been so hard on Marissa, if anyone had tried to help her. But the teachers and the counselors told her to wear different clothes, cried inevitability and ‘the way things are.’ Marissa’s parents might have provided some comfort, if they hadn’t been too busy slamming doors on one another and angrily staving off the divorce that they both knew was coming. Abigail remembered with icy clarity how she had vented her vicarious frustrations over Marissa’s treatment to her mother, only to hear her say that it was up to Marissa to act differently. When Abigail had argued back, her mother had looked at her as if she were a stranger, had asked when she’d become such a little feminist. She said it like a dirty word. That conversation stood out in Abigail’s memory from then on as significant. A rupture. A tiny hairline fracture in her trust—the first of many.

That spring and summer were a gauntlet for Marissa, a test of her sanity and will. She and Abigail didn’t talk about what was happening, a lot of the time, but it had been there between them, and Abigail had done what she could to help shoulder the burden.

(When she thought back she sometimes wondered if she’d done enough. Had the feeling of mutual understanding and support been only a figment inside her own mind? Should she have made it a conversation? Would that have made her a better friend? A worse friend? She often found herself making these calculations, retrospectively. What ifs and was I good enoughs. Making up for the future chances that were stolen.)

\+ + +

By the next fall, Marissa had adapted to her situation. Abigail didn’t know what catalyzed the transformation – it had happened rapidly and away from her observation. No matter what had done it, Marissa had stopped being hurt and started being angry. The change was unmistakable; Abigail spotted it before anyone else. Perhaps it was something in the way she carried herself, in the set of her shoulders or width of her stance. Abigail recognized it. So, when school came back, and the first boy sidled up and slipped his hand into Marissa’s back pocket, squeezed her ass – a joke, he insisted, as if his words were magic and could make it so – and Marissa twisted her fingers into his hair and yanked so hard there was blood, Abigail felt no surprise. She had known from the tilt of Marissa’s chin it was worth the suspension, to prove it to herself, and demonstrate it to everyone else. After that, other people had kept their distance from Marissa. They still stared, still gossiped and offered comments, but no one would come within arm’s reach.

It was hard for Abigail to separate the developments in her mind – Marissa’s budding spikiness and self-confidence, and her own adolescent feelings of attraction. Perhaps they could not be separated.

Marissa had started to spend more and more time at the Hobbs’; Marissa would show up red-faced from shouting matches with her mother, let herself in without knocking, come straight up to Abigail’s room and throw herself face-first on the bed without a word. Her parents didn’t like it, but Abigail never minded. She knew this Marissa was the girl beneath the shell, was sensitive as an exposed nerve. Abigail liked seeing her like this. At school, Marissa had become not so much a girl as a sustained performance of affected disinterest, all mean humor and defensive spite. The Marissa who collapsed on her bed didn’t have any words left. Abigail would sit on the bed next to her, would tuck Marissa’s head into her lap and run fingers through her hair until a calm silence eroded the furious one.

(Abigail wondered if, on those nights when Marissa stayed for dinner, in those last few months, her father had fed any of his victims to her? Did he save them for his family alone? Had Marissa been tainted by it, even before she was impaled on those antlers?)

Abigail’s mother had said she didn’t like the way Marissa talked to Mrs. Schurr, that she was a bad influence and Abigail ought not to spend so much time with her. She had said Marissa wore too much makeup, was going to end up getting herself in trouble if she didn’t change her attitude. 

(Abigail came to learn that her mother believed obedience bought you safety and happiness, that even though she would never say it out loud, her mother believed in her bones that bad things happened to bad people who had earned them in one way or another by making mistakes or perhaps being a kind of mistake themselves. Gradually, indelibly, this impressed itself on Abigail’s mind, so that when she found herself unsafe and unhappy, she could never bring herself to tell her mother, or anyone else. The fault was in her.)

Abigail had wished she could be as free as Marissa. She had such a hard time saying no, spent so many hours worrying what everyone thought of her. Marissa never seemed to care, even though Abigail knew, under the shell, she did. Still, there was nothing quite like being under the wing of Marissa’s bright, brave ferocity.

(And it was the same the day she died. When she’d tried to joke with Abigail about her guilt, Abigail panicked, wondered if she knew somehow, if she read the guilt of it the way that no one else could. But Marissa had still been the same as every, ready to hurl insults and rocks and hatred at anyone who had a bad word to say about Abigail. So Abigail realized, at what was to be their last moment together, how iron and unshaking was Marissa’s mistaken belief in her innocence).


End file.
